1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to monitoring of data in a two-way communications system, and more particularly, to monitoring of transmissions using a time stamp.
2. Background Art
In a DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) 1.1 or 2.0 system (published by Cable Labs, Inc., and which is incorporated by reference herein), downstream data is continuous and of uniform pipeline delay between a cable modem termination system (CMTS) output process blocks and a cable modem (CM) input processing blocks. It is in this region of uniform pipeline delay where the CMTS inserts SYNC messages and the CM extracts SYNC messages. Specifically, outside the region of uniform pipeline delay, there are many applications where storing transmission data for later processing can be useful, provided there is information available about the time of the transmission, i.e., a timestamp associated with the data.